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Culture and Cultural Policy in the Age of the Commissars :Bolshevism, the Arts, and the Future, 1917－85

－Part 2, 1953－85‡

Sabrina P. Ramet*

Table of contents (Part 2):

4. Long Live the Typical (1953-64)

5. Preserving the Ephemeral

6. Epilogue: The Future is NOW . . . or Was it Yesterday?

LONG LIVE THE TYPICAL (1953-64)

“Typicalness is the chief sphere in which the party spirit manifests itself in realistic art.The problem of the typical is always a political problem”

--Gyorgii Malenkov, Address to the 19th Congress of the CPSU (October 1952)122

“The typical”was not a discovery of the Khrushchev era. The concept had figured inEngels’writing and had been stressed by A. I. Stetsky in his address to the First Writers’Congress in 1934.123 But the term acquired a particular prominence in the years 1952-57,beginning with Malenkov’s address to the Nineteenth Party Congress and continuingthrough an expository treatment in Kommunist in 1955 and a prominence in discussions atthe Second All-Union Congress of Composers in 1957, and implicitly underpinnedKhrushchev’s thoughts about literature, film, jazz, and modern art. The latter two,indeed, were linked in Khrushchev’s mind as parallel denials of“the typical,”in favor ofthe embrace of abstractionism, decadence, and, of course,“formalism.”Nor are thesefeatures unrelated to the evolving Soviet tempology, for, at least from the standpoint ofSoviet Marxism, jazz and abstract art did not point to the future (since the“future”couldonly be unambiguous in Soviet teleology), or even to the present; in fact, they did not pointat all. And as such, they were pointless, which is to say, worse than useless.

That Stalin’s heir-apparent would take time in his keynote address at the party congressto dwell on the subject of“the typical”in art is, at the very least, indicative of the highpriority that party leaders attached to the cultural sphere. It also serves to remind usthat, for Soviet communism, atypicality was considered equivalent to“art for art’s sake,”which is to say“anti-People”and“anti-democratic”self-indulgence. In an importantpassage, Malenkov told the congress:

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* Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. During 1998she was Visiting Professor at Ritsumeikan University.

“In their creation of artistic images, our artists, writers and workers in the arts mustconstantly remember that the typical is not only what is encountered most frequently,but that which most fully and vividly expresses the essence of the given social force.In the Marxist-Leninist interpretation, the typical does not (at) all mean somestatistical average. The typical should correspond to the essence of the given socio-historical phenomenon; it is not just the widespread, the frequently repeated, or thecommonplace. Deliberate exaggeration which gives sharpness to an image does notmake the image atypical but shows and stresses the typical more fully.”124

But what was the relationship between socialist realism and“the typical”? And whatdid they mean in terms of the limits to creative freedom? In the wake of the Congress,polemics flared at a session of the Department of Literature and Languages of the USSRAcademy of Sciences concerning what was“typical.”Commenting on this row, Pravdaoffered the helpful suggestions that what is typical is“what one frequently encounters,”urging also a continued fight against“lack of ideological content.”125 With the passing ofStalin in 1953, the party began, albeit tentatively, to offer a more generous interpretationof the Stalinist strictures, albeit without renouncing them. Pravda (27 November 1953)set the tone for the early Khrushchev era by calling standardization“one of the worstdisasters for art”and by suggesting, perhaps a bit optimistically, that“socialist realismoffers boundless vistas for the creative artist and the greater freedom for the expression ofhis personality, [as well as] for the development of diverse art genres, trends, and styles.”126

In a token of the new orientation, Gyorgii Aleksandrov, an old foe of Zhdanov’s, wasappointed Minister of Culture.

Creative artists were quick to respond to the hint. Already in November 1953,Sovetskaia Muzyka carried an article by Khachaturian calling for an end to inordinatebureaucratic controls and more freedom for musicians. Khachaturian did not mince hiswords, but demanded,“We must, once and for all, reject the worthless interference inmusical composition as it is practised by musical establishments. Problems of compositioncannot be solved by official bureaucratic methods. . . . The sensible planning and carefulguidance of the country’s musical life must not be usurped by (bureaucratic) interference.”127

Shostakovich lent his support to this point of view in an article published in the samejournal two months later.“In my opinion,”Shostakovich wrote there,“the (Composers’) Union should not‘protect’our composers against exploring thenew, against independent movements along an unbeaten track in art. This is not thebold creative search for new paths but‘safe’sliding into superficiality, dullness, andcliches, that must be fought.”128

Khachaturian and Shostakovich were the outstanding“liberals”in music, while IvanDzerzhinsky, a largely unsuccessful composer who had little to his name besides his 1935opera, The Quiet Don, which had won Stalin’s favor, took to the battlements to defend“vigilance”and to fire volleys at“formalism.”129 Despite isolated voices of dissent, such“relaxation”as occurred at this stage was limited, derivative, and not programmatic.

Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 (premiered in Leningrad on 17 December 1953 and inMoscow 12 days later) struck all listeners as highly individual, defiant of formulae, and

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arguably“subjective”; its performances gave rise to debate, culminating in a three-dayconference of the Composers’Union, 29/30 March and 5 April 1954. Even today,speculation continues to the effect that the short, frenetic second movement, which stopsabruptly, after a dizzying display of ostensibly meaningless musical virtuosity, one mighteven say“violently,”was intended as a kind of“musical portrait”of Stalin.

Among writers of fiction, the thaw began more or less about the time that Surkovreplaced Fadeyev as First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (in October 1953).Shortly thereafter, at the Union’s Second Congress (the only previous congress havingtaken place in 1934!), the passage dealing with socialist realism in the final resolution wastrimmed, eliminating the exhortation to writers to play a role in“the task of ideologicallyremolding and training the laboring people in the spirit of socialism.”130 This changeencouraged hopes of liberalization. The journal Teatr tested the limits with an editorialarguing that“artistic truth”could only come from within the artist herself.131 One of theconsiderations which encouraged greater tolerance in literary policy was, as EvgeniiSergeev put it, that beginning in the mid-1950s, literary commissars began to admit tothemselves that“socialist-realist norms”were vague at best, and that, in practice, theyhad“no idea how to apply these norms to modern prose, poetry, and drama.”132 This leddirectly to“reinterpreting”socialist realism as“an‘open system’. . . open to all the bestof world experience, in the first place, of course, to modernism.”133

From 1954 to 1958, Soviet literature experienced tangibly more liberal conditions andsome novels were able to take up issues relating to youth, issues of love and marriage, andeven the bureaucratic nonsense of petty party officials! The most significant new workswritten during this brief period were Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel, The Thaw, VladimirDudintsev’s novel, Not By Bread Alone (1956), D. A. Granin’s novel, Opinion of One’s Own,short stories by V. V. Ovechkin and A. V. Kalinin, Leonid Zorin’s satirical play, The Guests,A. E. Korneichuk’s play, Wings, poems by Margarita Aliger, and some of the writings of V.F. Tendryakov. Even children’s literature became more exciting during these years. Andit was at this point in time that Ivan Efremov’s Andromeda (1957) was published, markinga new departure in Soviet science fiction.134

But some works produced in this period remained taboo. These works, such as theaforementioned novels by Dudintsev and Granin, were often characterized by deeppessimism, a sense of hopelessness, or the expression of unnegated ideas of anobjectionable nature.135 Dudintsev’s novel, like that of Granin, seemed to suggest“that theethical code of those in high positions does not correspond to the ideal of socialistmorality.”136 In a similar fashion, Korneichuk’s Wings offered a realistic portrayal ofbureaucratic methods of administration at a collective farm137 while Semyon Kirsanov’spoem,“Seven Days of the Week,”poked serious fun at the bureaucracy with a tale aboutits preference for people who are“uncomplicated, convenient, capable of fulfilling everycommand.”138 Particularly striking was Nicolai Pogodin’s play, Petrarch’s Sonnet, in whichone of the characters declares,“I consider class hatred a sacred and noble feeling. But in reality we no longer havehostile classes. Who is there to hate? one asks. There are scoundrels, thieves, riff-raff.They perhaps deserve contempt, and sometimes even compassion. But I am now

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speaking of great hatred. Whom in my country must I hate? Maybe it is time to learnto love.”139

In this atmosphere, selected works of Isaac Babel and Yuri Olesha were republished,satirical novels by Ilf and Petrov were reissued, and Russian audiences were allowed, forthe first time, to see George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, as well as plays by Jean-PaulSartre and Lillian Hellman, the works of Agatha Christie, Fredric Knott’s Dial M forMurder, and Noel Coward’s Nude with Violin. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, whichcould not be staged in Stalin’s time, were also seen in the Soviet Union for the first time.140

Even jazz flourished under Khrushchev’s uncomprehending leadership, in spite of theSoviet leader’s comparison of jazz to having gas in his stomach,141 at least untilKhrushchev issued his“theses”on jazz, which led to a closing of the Moscow Jazz Cluband a general dampening of the scene. On 13 June 1959, for instance, Komsomol’-skaiapravda argued that some jazz was acceptable -- a position restated by that paper on 25December 1960. The first jazz club was established in Leningrad in 1958 by pianist-promoter Yuri Vikharev. Soon thereafter, another club sprang up at LeningradUniversity, and in the following years, further clubs were set up in Moscow, Yaroslavl,Kuibyshev, Gorky, Novoskibirsk, Tashkent, Petrozavodsky, and Voronezh. A young poetnamed Yegeni Yevtushenko also broke into print at this time; Yevtushenko, together withfellow poets Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeni Vinokurov, seemed to capture the spirit ofthe age.142 They, together with poet Bella Akhamdulina, writers Vassillii Aksyonov andAnatolii Gladilin, sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, and bards Bulat Okudzhava and VladimirVysotsky, constituted, collectively, the embodiment of the so-called“beat generation.”143

And it was also at this time that Soviet young people had their first exposure to rockmusic.

The Twentieth Party Congress (1956) only reinforced the general trend of liberalization.But in 1957, the party set a course to reaffirm the orthodox paradigm. The so-called“Hungarian October”cast a long shadow over Soviet politics, and the editors ofKommunist, the CPSU ideological organ, drew a clear conclusion:“The events in Hungaryhave demonstrated the consequences of disregarding Leninist adherence to principle inquestions of the guidance of literature and art.”144 Writers and composers were thrown onthe defensive. Kazakevich, Margarita Aliger, Bek, and Kirsanov engaged in theestablished Soviet ritual of self-criticism, admitting their“errors”and promising to revisetheir works. The Second All-Union Congress of Composers (which was convened in March1957) reaffirmed the centrality of socialist realism, in spite of Shostakovich’s brave speechon that occasion calling for open discussions of problems and controversies -- a call thatmet with spontaneous applause. Gyorgii Khubov, in a major address to the congress,helped to elucidate problems of“the typical,”for, as he argued, the great danger in musicwas modernism (sometimes conflated with“formalism”), and modernism, as Khubovnoted, quoting from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia,“is characterized by the distortion ofreality, the refusal to represent the typical, the confirmation of reactionary tendencies, anti-people, cosmopolitanism.”145 It followed that to represent“the typical”was still the path toa“progressive”and“pro-people”stand. But for all that, and in spite of the proclivities ofUnion secretary Tikhon Khrennikov and of Khubov, the final resolution adopted by the


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Congress included an assurance that“there should be no room for any limitations, for anyconstraint of the freedom of creative search.”146 All in all, the results of the Congressrepresented a compromise between liberals and hard-liners, rather than a victory foreither grouping.

In the course of spring and summer 1957, Khrushchev delivered a series of speeches onliterature and art, collected and published in August of that year under the title, For CloseTies Between Literature and Art and the Life of the People. These speeches constituted thesemi-official guidelines in cultural policy until Khrushchev’s removal from power inOctober 1964. In the course of these speeches, Khrushchev referred to the conflict between“socialist culture”and“bourgeois culture,”maintaining that“in this conflict there canbe no neutrals.”147

In the wake of these speeches, party authorities sponsored the creation of an RSFSRWriters’Association, hoping to use it as a conservative bridgehead against the more“liberal”Union of Soviet Writers. The ploy worked. By the time the Union of SovietWriters held its Third Congress in May 1959, it had been tamed. The writers had been ledback to the glorification of“the typical.”

The Pasternak“affair”had its incubation in summer 1946, when Boris Pasternak, arenowned poet and accomplished translator, began work on his novel Dr. Zhivago.Completed ten years later, in December 1955, excerpts of the novel first reached the publicin Polish translation in the inaugural issue of the Polish quarterly, Opinie, in late summer1957. Before the year was out, the novel was published in full, in Italian translation; thefirst printing of 6,000 copies sold out on the first day.148 A Russian printing had, in fact,already been authorized, or so Fleishman tells us. But now, given the intense interest thatthe novel was generating in the West, Soviet authorities aborted publication of the Russianedition and began fulminating against the book. But these moves only stimulated Westerninterest. So Moscow’s authorities switched to a tactic of total silence concerning Pasternakand Zhivago, even cancelling plans to issue an edition of his poetry. Some believe that thecharacter of Dr. Zhivago was problematic for the 1950s, but the most fundamental issuewhich pitted the Soviet literary establishment against Pasternak was pure, unadulteratedjealousy. Then, on 23 October 1958, Pasternak was informed that he had won the covetedNobel Prize for literature. In response, meeting on 27 October, the Union of SovietWriters, confirming the deep jealousy that gripped their number, expelled Pasternak fromits ranks by unanimous vote, thereby depriving him of literary contracts, related income,and privileged access to scarce goods. A wave of indignation swept much of the world, buton 28 October, Pasternak cabled to decline the prize, citing (obliquely) pressure from theWriters’Union. Remarkably, however, the phrasing of this declination only furtherenraged the Soviet literary establishment. By 31 October, Pasternak’s fellow Sovietwriters passed a resolution by unanimous vote (nearly 800) to ask the Soviet governmentto deprive Pasternak of his Soviet citizenship and to deport him from the USSR. The textof the resolution was published in Literaturnaia gazeta on 1 November 1958. Meanwhile,Pasternak had drafted a reply of sorts, with the help of his wife, daughter, and two friends,in the form of an open letter to First Secretary Khrushchev and had rushed it to Pravda’soffices (thus appearing in Pravda on the same day that the Union’s resolution appeared in


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Literaturnaia gazeta). In the letter, he made no reference to guilt of any kind, noted he felthe had made a contribution to Soviet literature and said he could not imagine livingoutside Russia. The authorities decided, as a result of this letter, to allow Pasternak toremain in Russia and to retain the family dacha in Peredelkino, as well as his Moscowapartment, as well as to resume work translating Western works into Russian; inexchange, Pasternak was expected to provide a longer letter which, after much editing andcensoring, was published on 6 November. In self-defense, he wrote a poem, published inThe Daily Mail of London on 11 February 1959:“I am lost like a beast in an enclosureSomewhere are people, freedom and light.Behind me is the noise of pursuit,And there is no way out.”149

As for Dr. Zhivago, it was finally published in Russia only 30 years later, when it wasserialized in Novyi mir (in early 1988). After this episode, there was little surprise when,in 1960, KGB officials confiscated Vasilii Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate, which includesscenes of the respective wartime headquarters of Stalin and Hitler.150

In music and film, however, the picture was more complicated. It is true enough thatShostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 (subtitled“The Year 1905”), which took almost all of itsthemes from old prison and revolutionary songs, and which was premiered in 1957, is awork of stylized socialist realism, and that Khrennikov’s opera, Mother, which premieredthe same year, likewise embodied principles of socialist realism as generally applied inSoviet music; but, at the same time, the Central Committee adopted a resolution on 28May 1958 admitting that the campaign of 1948 had perpetrated grave injustice toShostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Miaskovsky, and others. Moreover, Khrushchevgranted first-time-ever permission for an American conductor to lead Soviet orchestras (forLeopold Stokowski in Moscow and Kiev, in June 1958) and allowed American composersRoger Sessions, Peter Mennin, Roy Harris, Ulysses Kay, and Aaron Copland to visit theUSSR, with Soviet composers Khrennikov, Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, KonstantinDankevich, and Fikret Amirov visiting the U.S. in reciprocation. And if there were somesour notes in the sphere of music -- such as Kabalevsky’s scornful dismissal of AlfredSchnittke’s oratorio Nagasaki as“falsely tragic”(in 1960)151 or Khrennikov’s chastisementof innovative Estonian composer Arvo Pärt at the Third All-Union Congress of Composers(in 1962) -- the premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 (in December 1962) to adeliriously enthusiastic audience, setting the text of Yevtushenko’s poem“Babyi Yar”tomusic, was a milestone in both musical history and Soviet political history.152

The film sector more closely paralleled developments in music than those in literature,perhaps reflecting the higher priority assigned to literature (relative to the other culturalsectors) in the Khrushchev era. A number of important films were screened inKhrushchev’s years, including Grigorii Chukhrai’s The Forty First (1956), MikhailKalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying (1957), Josef Heifitz’s The Lady with a Little Dog(1960), Andrei Tarkovsky’s short film The Steamroller and the Violin (1961), and MikhailRomm’s Nine Days in One Year (1961). Romm’s film gave rise to considerablecontroversy.153 Especially memorable was Elem Klimov’s feature-length comedy, Welcome


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(1964). Set in a summer camp for young Pioneers, the film depicts the establishment asrestrictive, obsessive, even lunatic, resulting in a totally madcap but politically provocativefilm.154

Toward the end of his years in office, Khrushchev, bowing to pressure exerted on him bycertain figures in his entourage and realizing that certain uncontrolled currents had beengiven tacit encouragement, tried to put the genie back into the bottle. Emblematic of thisdoomed effort was a speech by Leonid Ilyichev, chair of the Ideological Commission of theCentral Committee, on 17 December 1962. In this speech, Ilyichev warned dourly:“Formalistic tendencies have unfortunately begun to spread not only in therepresentational arts but in music, literature, and the cinema as well.“In music, for example, despite general progress, we observe an infatuation (among

the young) with the outlandish yowlings of various foreign -- and not only foreign --jazz bands. This refers not to jazz music in general but to the cacophony of soundswith which listeners are sometimes assailed and which is dignified with the name ofmusic only through a misconception. . . . .“Obviously, developments of this kind are not accidental. They bear witness that

some comrades misunderstand the nature of the struggle against bourgeois ideologyand sometimes lose sight of the irreconcilability of our ideological positions and theimpossibility of compromise on them.“We should remember as an immutable truth that art always has an ideological-

political bent, that in some way or another it expresses and defends the interests ofdefinite classes and social strata. And when we encounter this or that trend in art, thefirst question that naturally arises is: Whose interests does it serve, what does it callfor, what social ideals does it affirm?”155

But the genie was already out of the bottle. Khrushchev could rail against modern art, ashe did in a famous incident in 1962, or criticize“jazz”(which he was confusing with earlyrock-’n-roll) for encouraging its enthusiasts to“wiggle a certain section of the anatomy,”156

but what he could not do was to both reap the benefits of liberalism and retain theadvantages of Stalinism.

I mentioned earlier that Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956 had a shattering impact onthe Soviet tempology (among other things). That was unavoidable. Stalin’s reign hadpremised its claim to historical legitimacy on the argument that the“present”asconstituted and shaped by his policies was necessary in order to reach a fixed andpredetermined“future.”Khrushchev, in essence, characterized Stalinism as a“falsepresent,”and, given the nature of communism’s teleology, this contention could only beimportant if it entailed the further contention that Stalin’s“false present”had beenpushing the USSR toward a“false future.”But this in turn threatened to undermine thelegitimacy of Soviet rule altogether, unless Khrushchev and his comrades could make acase that they were restoring a prior past, what we might call the“true past”of Leninism.This, Khrushchev’s tempology was actually rather complicated:

Stalinist past----”false”future----Leninist past----”true”present----”true”future.Moreover, if Khrushchev and his comrades were able, as Stalin’s successors, to claim to be


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in a position to put the USSR back on its proper historical track, then there had to havebeen also some positive aspects about the system that Stalin had built.157 It followed thatcultural and political artifacts associated with the“false”aspects of the Stalinist past orwith processes of building toward Stalin’s“false future”were at risk of beingdelegitimated overnight.

PRESERVING THE EPHEMERAL

“My ship is a creation of able handsMy course is a total disaster.But just let the wind pick upAnd everything around will change,Including the idiot who thinks otherwise!But no one believes thatThere’s no wind on earth,Even if they’ve banned the wind.”

-- Time Machine, rock band (1978)158

Time Machine was only one of a number of rock bands to point to significant changestaking place in the Brezhnev era, changes that were irresistible, regardless of regimepreference. There was even an underground Leningrad band which took the name“Windsof Change.”The group remained out of favor with the authorities, however. For theauthorities wanted, indeed, to“band the wind,”to hold onto (or rather revive) the slipperyand already partially superseded legacy of Stalinism (and in fact, not even Stalinism itself,but rather, the Brezhnevites’reconstruction of it), to preserve that which was essentiallyephemeral. This orientation was clearly signaled already at the 23rd Congress of theCPSU (1966). The Tenth Resolution adopted at that congress sounded the call:“The Congress attaches great importance to developing the literature and art ofsocialist realism. The Party expects from creative workers new and important worksthat will impress by the depth and truthfulness of their reflection of life, by thestrength of their ideological inspiration, and by their high level of artistic mastery,that will actively assist in molding the spiritual outlook of the builder of Communism,and that will foster in Soviet people lofty moral qualities, devotion to Communistideals, a sense of civic duty, Soviet patriotism and socialist internationalism.”159

But what the Brezhnev regime wanted was a“soft”version of socialist realism. Thiswas made clear in an editorial published in Pravda more than a year earlier. Signed bythe paper’s new editor-in-chief, Aleksei Rumyantsev, the editorial noted, inter alia, thatthe party demanded, in the literary and cultural realm,“the existence of different schoolsand trends, different styles and genres competing with one another.”160 Even if socialistrealism was still held up as the standard, this was not merely a restatement or even justan expansion of Stalin’s old dictum,“socialist in content, national in form.”The stage was


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in fact set for careful liberalization. Already in 1965, thus, the Leningrad Philharmonicmade so bold as to revive Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 3, which had not been performedin the USSR for more than 30 years because of charges that it was“formalistic.”

Certainly, the Brezhnev regime professed to be preserving and maintaining socialistrealism as the ruling doctrine of the arts, but, as I have already suggested, this was largelyillusory. Already in the early post-Khrushchev years, despite the trial of Sinyavsky andDaniel and a certain mood of retrenchment, novelists and poets increasingly tested thelimits of the permissible, while Soviet literary scholarship began to display moreindependence, and hence, more integrity.161 There was, quite simply, no way of going backto the old days; even if the Brezhnev regime sponsored a rock group called “Happy Guys,”reviving the title of the 1934 film directed by G. V. Aleksandrov, the cultural sphere wasmoving inexorably forward.

Yuri Trifonov (1927-81) is illustrative of fiction-writing in the Brezhnev era. His Houseon the Embankment (1976) held up to full view the widespread corruption and low moraleof the period of high Stalinism, as well as the blatant opportunism of party careerists inthe 1930s. While censors allowed Embankment to be published, they balked at approvingthe same author’s Disappearance (published posthumously in 1987). In this latter novel,Trifonov recounts how a schoolboy won first prize in a contest involving the memorizationof Pushkin; his prize was a plastic statuette of“Young Comrade Stalin Reading Pushkin.”162

His colleague Andrei Bitov faced even more severe obstruction from the bureaucracy,being essentially blacklisted by Soviet publishers for a decade (1975-85). Bitov’s offensewas to ignore socially relevant themes and focus on private mental and emotional states.His Pushkin House, a 400-page novel with frequent overt and covert allusions toDostoyesvsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nabokov, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, and other writers, couldnot be published until after the advent of perestroika.

The Brezhnev regime found itself confronted with a growing disparity between what itthought it wanted and what writers were willing to write. The fact that Daniil Granin (b.1918) and I. Grekova (Elena Ventsel, b. 1907) saw fit to dig into Stalin-era excesses, andthat Gyorgii Semyonov (1931-92) was content to dwell at length on ostensibly purelycolorific but otherwise meaningless episodes (as in“A Play of Fancy,”1979) conjuring atmost an occasion for melancholia (as in“The Collection,”1985) was scarcely satisfying toKhrushchev’s successors.163

Although the Brezhnev regime embargoed much of the more critical literature that wasbeing written, some satire found its way into print. One of the most remarkable examplesof this genre is Vladimir Voinovich’s The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of PrivateIvan Chonkin, published in Paris in 1976. The novel’s main character, Chonkin, bears acomparison to Jaroslav Hasek’s“Good Soldier S

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vejk.”Both men are dim-witted, naïve,literal-minded, and apt to undermine procedures and orders in the very act of adhering tothem. Thus, Voinovich has Chonkin ask, during a political education session, whetherComrade Stalin had two wives (at once) and, in“battle action,”defends his plan againstNKVD troops whom he, inevitably, mistakes for Germans.164 Nor does Stalin fare well inVoinovich’s flight of fancy, where he appears to Chonkin, in a dream, dressed as a womanand carrying an unloaded rifle -- in a rather transparent comment on Stalin’s sexual


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potency (and thereby providing an indirect answer to Chonkin’s question about Stalin’sconjugal status).165 Throughout this novel, Voinovich holds up rather compromising aspectsof Soviet reality to view. In Voinovich’s account, sexual fantasies are contrary to militaryregulation and party officials derive feelings of reassurance bordering on rapture simply byrepeating the word“comrades”over and over. As for the system’s faithful, one of theirexemplars is a scientist named Gladyshev, an NKVD informant who is“inspired by theprogressive teachings of Michurin and Lysenko,”who had by then fallen into disreputeeven in the USSR. Gladyshev comes up with a“logical” way of cutting the Gordian knotof Soviet agriculture. “Since, as he observes, dung is the fertilizer which starts foodgrowing, and since all good, having been digested, returns to the state of dung, one couldsimplify the natural cycle and do away with the need for agriculture by living on dungalone.”166

But Voinovich was an exception. Many other works such as A Book of the Blockade byDaniil Granin and Ales’Adamovich, War’s Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Aleksievich,Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate, Boris Yampol’skii’s Moscow Street, and YuriDombrovskii’s The Department of Unnecessary Things had to wait until Brezhnev wasdead before they could obtain an audience. On the other hand, so-called“village prose”continued to be able to find its way into print. Emerging in the 1950s,“village prose”ischaracterized by nostalgia for rural Russia and anxiety concerning its transformation.Probably the best known among“village writers”is Valentin Rasputin (b. 1937) whoseFarewell to Matyora (1976) figures as a protest against those who are destroying theenvironment and uprooting families from homesteads passed for centuries from father toson.167

It remains to say a few words about Aleksandr Zinoviev, whose major novels of theBrezhnev-era were all published by L’Age d’Homme Press in Lausanne, Switzerland (inRussian). Three novels concern us here: Yawning Heights (published in 1976), TheRadiant Future (published in 1978), and The Madhouse (published in 1980). These novelscome as close to being the“opposite”of socialist realism as one can imagine, seeingthrough the claims of Soviet apologists and depicting Soviet reality for what it was. InYawning Heights, for example, Zinoviev portrays Soviet society as permeated by“hypocrisy, oppression, corruption, waste, irresponsibility (individual and collective),shoddy work, boorishness, idleness, disinformation, deceitfulness, drabness, [and]bureaucratic privilege,”and suggests that such a syndrome coexists with“a distortedevaluation of personality -- nonentities are elevated to great heights, exceptional peopleare debased.”168 One need think only of the treatment meted out to Pilniak, Zoshchenko,Akhmatova, Zamiatin, Pasternak, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Miaskovsky, Khachaturian,Eisenstein, and others to see the point. In Radiant Future, Zinoviev suggests that mostSoviet“liberals”chose that posture out of career opportunism, while Madhouse showsprotagonist JRF rhapsodizing about the alleged advantages enjoyed by“Soviet man”: innot having to have any opinions, emotions, aspirations, or principles.169 That Soviet realitycrushes the spirit of the individual is clearly indicated in Zinoviev’s comment, inMadhouse:

[Soviet man] is only a functional component of a more complex whole -- the collective


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-- but a component which reflects all the qualities of that whole . . . They, that isSoviet man and our collective, are born and exist as an integral, inseparableentity.170

In the film sector, the“reaction against the relative freedom of the Khrushchev years”gained momentum, reaching high tide in 1968, a year characterized, in Fomin’s words, by“pogroms”in the cinematic sector.171 The tone had been set in August of the preceding yearin a report drafted by V. Shauro, head of the Cultural Department of the CPSU CentralCommittee, which alleged that“various kinds of social disorders and the shady sides oflife”were being given“an inordinate amount of attention”in Soviet films.172 By the 1970s,a new formula had been worked out for the film sector:

This was a return to Stalinist aesthetic norms -- of course, without their extremes. Youwere allowed to excite, to amuse, to elicit pensiveness, but under no circumstances todisturb the audience.173

Films had to be safe.The age was dominated by Filipp Ermash, who served as head of Goskino from 1972 to

1986. Ermash was interested in maximizing attendance at Soviet films and maximizingprofits for the Soviet film industry. This meant that a balance had to be struck betweensatisfying public demand and upholding socialist values. Perhaps the most successfulexpression of this“balancing”was the 1980 film, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, whichstarred Vera Alentova as the dedicated factory worker who rises through the ranks tobecome manager, and Andrei Batalov, as the dignified, proud worker who is knowledgeableabout the sciences and humanities. Saccharine in places, the film paints an endearingportrait of the two lovers and succeeds as a romantic story, even while presenting a roseatepicture of factory life, the countryside, and Soviet life in general.

Where political disengagement had been treated as hostility in the Stalin era, apoliticalfilms were not only made now, but stood a chance at box-office success. Examples areIronies of Fate, or Have a Good Sauna (1975) and An Office Romance (1978). Morecomplex was Sergei Mikaelian’s The Bonus (1975), which cast a brigade leader as the heroand the party managers as“villains.”174 Moreover, satire, which was becoming moreexplicit during these years, was starting to make its presence felt in films of the Brezhnevera. In a marvelously ironic moment, Garage (1980), a film by Eldar Ryazanov and EmilBraginsky, has one of its characters, upon learning that his conversation-partner is ascholar researching satire, say,“You have an odd profession. You are studying a subjectwhich does not exist.”175

Arguably the most profound film director working during the Brezhnev years was AndreiTarkovsky, whose films Andrei Rublev (1969), Solaris (1972), Mirror, and Stalker (1980)had a poetic character. Tarkovsky understood his art in tempological terms, describing“the mission of film as art in victory over time.”176 In Tarkovsky’s concept, it was the“rhythm”of the film which disclosed the movement of time, which, in turn, was reflectedin the psychological development of the central character or characters. Tarkovskyeventually fell out of favor with Soviet officaldom. He ended his life in exile and his lasttwo films were made abroad.177


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In the film sector as in the literary sphere, as already noted, the Brezhnev governmentwanted films that were“safe.”But Brezhnev, unlike Stalin, was not willing to play anactive part in the drafting of the script and the actual filming. The result was that theregime’s wishes were expressed not so much in actual interference in the creative processas in determining what might and might not be seen in Soviet theaters. Thus, NikitaMikhalkov’s 1975 film, At Home Among Strangers, A Stranger at Home, a Soviet-style“spaghetti Western,”complete with duster coat and cowboy hat, set against the backdropof the Russian Civil War, was judged appropriate for Soviet audiences, as were GyorgiiDanielia’s Autumn Marathon (1980) and Sergei Yutkevich’s Lenin in Paris (1981).Meanwhile, Andrei Rublev, though completed in 1969, was only released two years later,due to reservations on the part of the authorities, and after it had already been scheduledto be shown at the 1971 Belgrade Film Festival, the Soviet authorities pulled the film atthe last minute on grounds that“it does not correspond to historical truth.”178 On the otherhand, Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s The Story of Asya Klyachkina, Who Fell in Love ButNever Married (1966) and Elem Klimov’s The Adventures of a Dentist (1967) were too muchfor the Brezhnev-era censors, who refused to authorize a public screening of either film.The problem with Asya Klyachkina lay in its realistic depiction of the bleakness of rurallife in Russia, while Dentist was deemed unacceptable because of the depiction ofmediocrities envying a talented dentist.179 Similarly, Gleb Panfilov’s 1979 film, Theme,which took up the subject of Jewish emigration, was not shown to Soviet audiences until1986, while Elem Klimov’s Rasputin (completed 1975), which offered a sympatheticportrait of Tsar Nicholas II, could not be publicly shown until 1984. Simplicity was clearlya ticket to favor with officialdom in the Brezhnev years, as Moscow Does Not Believe inTears demonstrated. Thus, when director Aleksei German put together his Trial on theRoad in 1971, which traced the transformation of a Nazi collaborator into a courageousSoviet hero, the unmistakable departure from the dictates of Soviet optimism was toomuch for the censors, who held the film up for 15 years.180 Nor surprisingly, as theBrezhnev era drew to a close, there was a backlog of films waiting to be seen. These beganto reach the screen already during the brief secretaryships of Andropov and Chernenko,and were experienced, by the time Gorbachev was in power, as a kind of flood.

As in literature and film, so too in the sphere of music. Here there were six broad genresof music. The most innocent of these were traditional folk music (narodnaia muzyka) andestrada (the Soviet equivalent of much of the material recorded in the U.S. at that time orjust a bit earlier by Petula Clark and Andy Williams, as well as almost everything recordedby Tom Jones). Concerning these two subgenres, the Soviet regime of the late 1960s,1970s, and early 1980s scarcely needed to reflect. The other four genres -- classical music,bard music, jazz, and rock -- were infinitely more complex from a political standpoint.Where narodnaia muzyka and estrada clearly offered no challenge to the status quo, onehad to make a much more differentiating judgment where individual artifacts of theseother genres were concerned.

After Khrushchev’s fall, Ilyichev was transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, andflexibility became the keynote of the Brezhnev era. Increasingly, it became possible todiscuss esoteric music in the pages of Sovetskaia Muzyka, without referring everything to


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“socialist realism.”Shostakovich’s striking public defense, in this period, of the use of anymusical devices, including 12-tone, when“justified . . . by the idea of the composition,”could not have taken place even in the Khrushchev era, let alone under Stalin.181

Shostakovich was able to work finally without harassment from officialdom, and 1969 sawthe premiere of his Symphony No. 14, Opus 135. The work is“sorrowful, ranging from asense of restrained concentration to one of furious and frenzied tragedy.”182 In his QuartetNo. 12, Opus 133, which had premiered the year before, Shostakovich blends 12-tone rowswith tonality, defying musical conventions, which had“prescribed”that one“should”optfor either atonalism or tonality, but not both at once.183 It was also in the Brezhnev erathat composers Shnittke and Pärt, the former lauded among other things for his SymphonyNo. 1 (1972) and his Faust Cantata (1983), and the latter highly regarded for his Miserere,among other works, emerged from obscurity onto the world stage.184

The bards -- Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky, and Aleksandr Galich (real nameAleksandr Arkad’evich Ginzburg) -- were another matter. Accompanying themselves onthe guitar, they sang of the everyday concerns of Russians, being perhaps in some waycomparable to the American folk singers Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, and (at leastbefore their revival) Peter, Paul, and Mary. “Guitar poetry,”as their performance issometimes called, arose in Russia in the 1950s and, with time, became so familiar that italmost seemed“typical”of Russia. As Gerald Smith notes, the guitar poetry of theRussian bards was“an expression of dissent from officially promoted and accepted forms,themes, and style.”185 All of them experienced some problems at the hands of theauthorities. Okudzhava, who began his career as a poet in 1946,186 built up a following bythe late 1950s. The authorities did not appreciate Okudzhava’s style, however, and hesoon found himself under attack in the official press.187 In spring 1972, he was summonedbefore the Union of Soviet Writers after some of his poetry had been published abroad, andin June of that year, was expelled from the Communist Party for“anti-Party behavior.”188

Vysotsky was subjected to public attack in the party press, where he was accused ofslandering Soviet reality, of failing to acknowledge the heroism of the Soviet public duringWorld War Two, and of“reveling in our shortcomings and making fun of what the Sovietpeople is right to feel proud of.”189 At one point, Vysotsky was even reprimanded by theauthorities, though he continued to sing, as if unintimidated.190 As for Galich, he started invaudeville in 1948, reaching his peak as an official Soviet writer in the late 1950s. Hiscareer with officialdom suffered a reversal in 1958 when a play he had written was bannedon the very eve of opening night. But his work continued to obtain an airing in the Sovietmedia until 1967. Galich’s style was strident and explicit. In his song,“The Night Watch,”Galich warned that nothing essential had changed in the Soviet system since Stalin. Thewarning, Smith recounts,“is conveyed through a nightmare vision in which the thousandsof discarded statues of‘The Genius of All Times and Peoples’come to life and make amoonlit march on Red Square, there to review a parade of monsters. Then morning comes,and

‘The bronze statues go back where they came from,But the alabaster ones lie hidden away.Maybe they’re crippled for the time being,


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But even their dust retains its shape,These alabaster ones just need some human flesh,And once more they’ll acquire their greatness!

And the drums will beat!The drums will beat,Beat, beat, beat!’”191

Eventually, the authorities had their fill of Galich and on 29 December 1971, he wasexpelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, and soon thereafter, from the Union ofCinematographic Workers, depriving him of literary earnings and ending his privilegedaccess to scarce material goods.192 But, for Galich, it is not the Soviet Union which set themoral standards for humanity or which constituted the measure of truth as such. This ishinted at in Galich’s song,“Islands”:

“They say there are some islands somewhere,Where on the shore grows the grass of oblivion,It cures pride, and grief, and baseness, and sickness,That’s the kind of island there are on earth!

“They say there are some islands somewhere,Where twice two doesn’t always make four,Count as much as you like, it’s all a mist,Only what suits your heart is right, that alone.That’s the kind of island there is on earth!

“They say there are some islands,Where untruth is not truth,Where there’s no idleness, no poverty,And no pale of settlement, nor ever was.That’s the kind of islands I’ve imagined.”193

Of the two remaining genres, jazz was clearly the more innocent. To begin with, few jazzmusicians adopted the kind of provocative names fashionable among rockers, deckedthemselves out in message-laden garb, or emphasized shock as part of the performanceitself. Moreover, Brezhnev’s Prime Minister, Aleksei Kosygin, was reliably reported tohave been a fan of“cool jazz.”194 As early as May 1965, Izvestiia published a favorablearticle about Soviet jazz by the well-known jazz historian A. Medvedev. Medvedev told hisreaders,“Jazz is a complex, multifaceted, controversial phenomenon whose essence andartistic principles are difficult to contain in a simple formula.”195 This set the tone for yearsto come. Jazz was not merely rehabilitated but actually encouraged -- for example by callsin Komsomol’skaia pravda for more jazz concerts and by a broadcast on Moscow Televisionof a contest for jazz ensembles. And if, by the early 1980s, there were some strange thingsbeing perpetrated by groups such as Sergei Kuryokhin’s jazz-rock band, Popular


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Mechanics, at least these innovations were largely confined to Leningrad.196

As we have seen, rock music had barely penetrated Russia by the end of the Khrushchevera. It was, thus, only in the Brezhnev era that the authorities were forced to come to gripswith rock as a“mass phenomenon.”As early as 1966, there were dozens of groups in themajor Soviet cities. A listing of Moscow bands circa 1968 hinted at a problem, with namessuch as Hairy Glass, Little Red Demons, Witchcraft, Fugitives from Hell, YoungComanches, Purple Catastrophe, and Nasty Dogs.197 These names did not suggest the kindof optimistic and dedicated young people that the Soviet authorities hoped to raise. Theinevitable solution was that Soviet officialdom entered the rock business, establishing aclean-cut group of optimists called“Happy Guys”in 1968, involving the KGB in thecreation of a beat club at Moscow’s Melody and Rhythm Café in 1969, and even sponsoring,via the local Komsomol organization, a rock festival in Gorky in 1971.198 In the mid-1970s,the Komsomol established its own network of disco clubs, in which it supervised themusical fare. Authorities also drew up lists of groups categorizing them as either approved(i.e., sponsored and censored) or unapproved (i.e., unsponsored, but still subject toscrutiny). The authorities were not stingy about advice either, and, for example, called inYuri Shevchuk, leader of the Leningrad band DDT, to advise him to write lyrics thatshowed an appreciation of official policies. The official group Samotsvety (later renamedPlamya) showed how to please the authorities with their 1970s official hit,“Our Address isthe Soviet Union”:

“The heart is aching, the heart is caring.The postal cargo is being packed.Our address is not a house or a street.Our address is the Soviet Union. . . .

“We are with the guys who are sensible.We are where the posters say,‘Ahead!’Where the toiling countrySings the good, new songs.”199

But it was one thing to create a sector of the rock scene that one could control. It wasquite another matter to control the rock scene as such. Groups such as Alisa, Aquarium,Bravo, Cement, Kino, DDT, DK, Nautilius Pompilius, Strange Games, and Time Machinebuilt their reputations and their followings on the basis of a combination of parody andsocial satire. Cement, for example, recycled primitive“socialist realist”songs from the1930s and early 1940s, set them to a rock beat, and thereby created insanely farcicalparodies of the socialist message. In spite of these groups’sundry“provocations,”theBrezhnev regime’s response was, when compared with either Stalin’s way of handlingthings he did not like or even with the modus operandi of the Andropov/Chernenkotransition, limp. Only with the death of Brezhnev in 1982 and the accession of Andropovdid vigilance once again become the watchword. Konstantin Chernenko, then chief ofideology, delivered a blistering attack on rock music in August 1983 and the following year,with Chernenko by then at the helm, Komsomol“commandos”were raiding centers for


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black marketeering in banned recordings and, in 1985, undertook“musical raids”to weedout“low-grade music”from discos and rock clubs.200 In addition, a commission was set upto review professional (approved) groups, leading to the dissolution of up to half of theprofessional groups, and an order went out that 80 percent of the songs performed atconcerts had to be the work of members of the Union of Soviet Composers.201 Efforts tocontain rock gradually collapsed, along with everything else, in the era of glasnost andperestroika.

We have seen that the early Bolsheviks had a clear, if highly opinionated, sense of thehistoricity of their political experiment and that this sense, embedded in a specifictempology, was reflected in the cultural artifacts of the age. We have seen, further, thatthe focus on the future was profoundly important in Soviet politics and culture during theyears 1917-56, and, in a revised format, even after 1956 (remember Khrushchev’s pledgesto“bury”the West!). But with the Brezhnev era, one perceives a fading of the sense ofhistoricity, and a shelving of the future -- quite literally, as reflected in the Brezhnev-eraabandonment of the Leninist concept of the withering away of the state and the inventionof the concept of the“all-people’s state.”It is, thus, also the relationship to the futurewhich became occluded in this period. Indeed, in aesthetic terms, one may say that withthe years, the Brezhnev regime gradually lost any concept of the future at all, with theresult that the notion of a cultural policy attuned to the needs of realizing and assuring aspecific future slipped from consciousness. In this sense, the term“stagnation,”whichcame in Gorbachev’s days to be generally applied to the Brezhnev era, was alsoappropriate in highlighting the loss of temporality and teleology which had once permeatedand infused the cultural sphere.

EPILOGUE: THE FUTURE IS NOW . . . OR WAS IT YESTERDAY?

The cultural sphere is the domain of aesthetic reflection on the meaning of humanaction. But, as has been stated above, any understanding of the meaning of human actionpresumes and requires a temporal topology or tempology. Arthur N. Prior and Richard G.Swinburne, among others, favor what has been called the “standard topology” for time,i.e., a construal of time as“boundless, continuous, linear, and non-branching.”202 It is onlya tempology which can indicate whether the meaning of present actions is to be soughtprimarily in the distant future, the near future, merely the present, or even in the past(whether remote or proximate), and it is in the nature of a tempology, by virtue of whathas already been said of it, to provide a model of the“structure”of time or -- if one prefers-- to structure time. It follows that the cultural sphere presumes and depends upon aspecific tempology and, further, that changes in the tempology are reflected in tangiblechanges in the cultural sphere.

The communists were the most conscious of this interconnection between cultural sphereand tempology in their earliest years in power. It was in those years that their tempologywas characterized by a“strong future,”i.e.,“the belief that there is only one possiblefuture”which could emanate from their actions.203 Over time, the Bolshevik concept of thefuture weakened so that, by the time one reaches the Gorbachev era, one can justly speak


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of the USSR’s having a dominant tempology characterized by a“weak future.”Pushed tothe point of extreme weakness (as occurred during and after Gorbachev’s term of office),such a tempological feature forecasts “no actual future but only a number of alternativepossible futures.”204

Upon accession to the General Secretaryship in 1985, following the brief terms ofAndropov (1982-84) and Chernenko (1984-85), Gorbachev set about to change certainelements in the Soviet political formula, while holding the others steady. It was only abouttwo years into his term of office that he realized, first, that the component elements of theSoviet political formula were so interconnected that one could not change the elements heproposed to change without changing much more besides, and second, that theaccumulated pressures for change which had been building already since Stalin’s deathand which had been first adumbrated in the cultural sphere, were no more to be resisted.By the time Gorbachev realized these things, it was too late to retrace his steps, too late torewind the clock to 1985, too late to alter the significance of glasnost and perestroika.Gorbachev was forced to confront the fact, stealing a line from David Lewis’s essay,“TheParadoxes of Time Travel,”that“You cannot change a present or future event from whatit was originally to what it is after you change it. What you can do is to change the presentor the future from the unactualized way they would have been without some actions ofyours to the way they actually are.”205 But worse, once the Soviet future had been“killed,”as it were, the only Soviet“future”that remained was the“future”of lore, the“future”of which the early Bolsheviks and Futurists had dreamt. The future, it seems, wasyesterday.

It was during Gorbachev’s term of office that Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur,completed sixty years earlier, was finally published (in 1988). The novel is a brilliantparody of Bolshevik revolutionary utopianism, mocking Stalin’s slogan“socialism in onecountry”by depicting the farcical efforts of the residents of the town of Chevengur toachieve“socialism in one town.”In a sense, the belated publication of Platonov’s novelprovides a fitting epitaph to the communist era in Russian literature and culture. In thisnovel, the Chevengurians come under the illusion that they have escaped the vicissitudesof history, that they are no longer subject to the ravages of fatigue, decay, ordisintegration; one might even say that, in their view, time itself had been abolished. Theydeclare, almost gaily, the end to“all of world history.”But their illusions eventually resultin the demise of the Chevengurian utopic experiment.206 In this way, Platonov may even becredited with having prophesied the eventual collapse of the Soviet system.

The Gorbachev era was, to be sure, a time of restless soul-searching, of intense politicalcreativity, a time in which the preexisting political paradigms were scuttled even beforenew paradigms had been designed or embraced. Where Stalin had tried to isolate theUSSR from the world outside, inspiring Churchill’s apt metaphor of an“iron curtain,”Gorbachev sought to reintegrate the USSR in what he called“our common Europeanhome.”And the cultural sphere was, for its part, a component in that aspiration. But inhis rush to bank everything on“my friend, Ron,”and in his naïve willingness to cut loosefrom 70 years of state-building and culture-building, Gorbachev -- who had never readMachiavelli’s warnings about autocracies which embrace rapid reform, and who even


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refused, haughtily, to read Machiavelli207 -- sealed the fate of the Soviet“future.”In sodoing, he unconsciously spited Heidegger’s admonition that“the fundamentalphenomenon of time is the future.”208 Lose one’s topological construct of the future, and oneloses one’s bearings.

Post-Gorbachev Russia, buffeted by mafias, nationalists, religious hegemonists, andother forces out of control, is thus a Russia not only lacking a sense of direction, butlacking any figment of unity. No longer does Russia speak with one voice, march“iron-willed”with eyes fixed on a certain future. No longer is Russian time frozen,predetermined, planned, and charted in advance. Russian time is now branching time, fullof uncertainty, unpredictable. And no longer can Russian poets pen something akin toDemyan Bedny’s Civil War-era poem,“The Highway,”which ends with the words,

“March! March!The bourgeois state is a rubbish heapThe proletariat has taken over the GovernmentInterfere not!”209

NOTES‡I am grateful to Viktor Gaiduk for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and toMary Reichert who read the Russian-language materials cited herein.122. Pravda (6 October 1952), trans. in Current Digest of Soviet Press, Vol. 4, No. 39 (8 November

1952), p. 45. For further discussion of the “typical,” see Güther, Die Verstaatlichung derLiteratur, pp. 32-35; also Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, AestheticDictatorship, and Beyond, trans. from German by Charles Rougle (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1992), p. 51.

123. A. I. Stetsky,“Under the Flag of the Soviets, under the Flag of Socialism,”in Soviet Writers’Congress 1934, p. 267.

124. Pravda (6 October 1952), trans. in Current Digest of Soviet Press, Vol. 4, No. 39 (8 November1952), p. 45.

125. Pravda (30 November 1952), p. 1, trans. in Current Digest of Soviet Press, Vol. 4, No. 48 (16January 1953), p. 45.

126. Quoted in Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, p. 273.127. Quoted in Ibid., p. 275.128. Quoted in Ibid., p. 276.129. Ibid. 130. Quoted in Swayze, Political Control, p. 113.131. Ibid.132. Evgenii Sergeev,“Neskol’ko zastarelykh voprosov,”in E.A. Dobrenko (ed.), Izbavlenie ot

mirazhei: Sotsrealizm segodnia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), p. 21.133. Dmitrii Urnov,“Iskusstvo istoricheskogo optimizma, ili tridtsat’let spustia,”in Dobrenko

(ed.), Izbavlenie, pp. 103-104.134. Patrick L. McGuire, Red Stars: Political Aspects of Soviet Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, MI:

UMI Research Press, 1985), pp. xiv, 18-19, 25.135. George Gibian,“Soviet Literature during the Thaw,”in Hayward and Labedz (eds.),

Literature and Revolution, pp. 135-136.136. Swayze, Political Control, p. 165.137. Literaturnaia gazeta (20 September 1955), trans, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol.


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7, No. 42 (30 November 1955), p. 6.138. Quoted from Kirsanov’s poem in Swayze, Political Control, p. 170.139. Quoted in Swayze, Political Control, p. 176.140. Francois de Liencourt,“The Repertoire of the Fifties,”in Hayward and Labedz (eds.),

Literature and Revolution, pp. 160-162. The plays by Sartre and Hellman were subjected tothe usual rewriting, before being staged.

141. Starr, Red and Hot, pp. 261-270.142. See Andrei Voznesenskii, Na virtual’nom vetru (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), especially pp. 77-

85; and Evgenii Evtushenko, Volchii pasport (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), especially pp. 220-271.

143. See Pierre Forgues,“The Young Poets,”in Hayward and Labedz (eds.), Literature andRevolution, pp. 170-197; and Inger Thorup Lauridsen and Per Dalgard, The Beat Generationand the Russian New Wave (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1990), p. 15 and passim.Lauridsen and Dalgard also include Andrei Bitov as a“beat generation”writer.

144. Quoted in Swayze, Political Control, p. 188.145. Quoted in Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, pp. 303-304, my emphasis.146. Quoted in Ibid., p. 305.147. Quoted in Ibid., p. 308.148. Fleishman, Boris Pasternak, pp. 258, 282, 284.149. Quoted in Ibid., p. 303.150. Vladimir Voinovich,“The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman and his Novel,”in Survey, Vol.

29, No. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 186-188.151. Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, p. 328.152. Wilson, Shostakovich, pp. 357-364; Norman Kay, Shostakovich (London: Oxford University

Press, 1971), pp. 56-57; and L. Mikheeva, Zhizn’ Dmitriia Shostakovicha (Moscow: Terra,1997), pp. 285-286, 301-302. Regarding Symphony No. 13, see also I. D. Glikman, compilerand commentator, Pis’ma k drugu: Pis’ma D. D. Shostakovicha k I.D. Glikmanu (Moscow &St. Petersburg: DSCH & Kompozitor, 1993), pp. 174-175, 183-184.

153. Jeanne Vronskaya, Young Soviet Film Makers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), pp.18-19.

154. Ibid., pp. 36-37.155. Leonid Ilyichev,“Providing an Ideological Framework,”reprinted in Priscilla Johnson,

Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1962 (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1965), pp. 109-110, 111.

156. Nikita Khrushchev (1 December 1962), quoted in Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, p. 102.157. Khrushchev, of course, knew from the beginning that criticizing a maximalist system could

only be vastly complicated.158. Quoted in Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (Boston

and London: Faber & Faber, 1987), p. 42.159. Quoted in George Roseme,“The Politics of Soviet Literature,”in Strong (ed.), The Soviet

Union under Brezhnev and Kosygin, p. 179. See also V. R. Shcherbina,“Sovietskaialiteratura i sotsialisticheskaia kul’tura,”chap. II in Dukhovnyi mir razvitogosotsialisticheskogo obschchestva (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 271-272.

160. Quoted in Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, p. 440.161. Gleb Struve,“Developments on the Soviet Literary Scene,”in Strong (ed.), The Soviet Union

under Brezhnev and Kosygin, p. 164. Regarding the trial of Aleksandr Ilyich Ginzburg, YuriTimofetevich Galanskov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lashkova, seePavel Litvinov (compiler), The Trial of the Four: A Collection of Materials on the case ofGalanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky, & Lashkova, 1967-68 (London: Longman, 1972).

162. Deming Brown, The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction 1975-1991


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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 21, 23.163. Ibid., pp. 38-44.164. Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism, pp. 145, 148.165. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere,“From Incompetence to Satire: Voinovich’s Image of Stalin as

Castrated Leader of the Soviet Union in 1941,”in Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Spring1991), pp. 38-40.

166. Ibid., pp. 151, 152. For further discussion of Voinovich, see Wolfgang Kasack,“VladimirVoinovich and His Undesirable Satires,”in Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman (eds.),Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe (Columbus, Ohio: SlavicaPublishers, 1980), pp. 259-276.

167. Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism, pp. 84-85.168. Quoted in Kirkwood, Alexander Zinoviev, p. 68.169. Ibid., pp. 102, 130-131.170. Quoted in Ibid., p 131.171. V. Fomin, Kino i vlast’. Sovetskoe kino: 1965-1985 godu -- Dokumenty svridetel’stva,

razmyshleniia (Moscow: Maternik, 1996), p. 12.172. Quoted in Ibid., p. 12.173. Iurii Klepikov,“Svoboda v. Kletke,”in Fomin, Kino i vlast, p. 170.174. Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992), pp. 11-14.175. Quoted in Ibid., p. 15.176. Viacheslav Ivanov,“Vremia i veshchi,”in A. N. Sandler (ed.), Mir i fil’my Andreia

Tarkovskogo (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1991), p. 232. See also Daniel J. Goulding (ed.), FiveFilmmakers: Tarkovsky, Forman, Polanski, Szabo, Makavejev (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1994); and Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of AndreiTarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), chap. 8.

177. Aleksandr Misharin,“Na krovi, kul’ture i istorii . . .,’”in O Tarkovskom, compiled by M.A.Tarkovskaia (Moscow: Progress, 1989), p. 63; and Ebbo Demant,“V poiskakh utrachennogovremeni. Izgnanie i smert’Andreia Tarkovskogo. Stsenarii dokumental’nogo fil’ma,”in OTarkovskom, pp. 358-359.

178. Quoted in Vronskaya, Young Soviet Film Makers, p. 35.179. Ibid., pp. 36-38.180. Lawton, Kinoglasnost, pp. 22-31. See also Neya Zorkaya, The Illustrated History of the

Soviet Cinema (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), pp. 225-302.181. Quoted in Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, p. 482. On the other hand, see T. N.

Khrennikov,“sovremennost’i muzyka nashikh dnei,”chap. 13 in Dukhovnyi mir razvitogosotsialisticheskogo obshchestva (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 330-334, 338-339.

182. Mikheeva, Zhizn’Dimitriia Shostokovicha, p. 339.183. Ibid., pp. 71-72.184. On Schnittke, see Tamara Burde, Zum Leben und Schaffen des Komponisten Alfred

Schnittke (Kludenbach: Gehann Musik Verlag, 1993); and Victor Yerofeyev,“AlfredSchnittke and His Music,”in Soviet Scene 1987 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1987), pp.222-229.

185. Gerald Stanton Smith, Songs to Seven Strings: Russian Guitar Poetry and Soviet‘MassSong’(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 230.

186. On Okudzhava’s poetry, see Karl-Dieter van Ackern, Bulat Okudzava und die kritischeLiteratur über den Krieg (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission, 1976). See also“‘Vse, chto ia delaiu -- sviazano s moim otnosheniem K liudiam . . .’ Beseda s BulatomOkudzhavoi,”in Zapechatlennye golosa. Parizhkie besedy s russkimi pisateliami i poetami,compiled by Vitalii Amurskii (Moscow: MIK, 1998), pp. 89-98.


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187. Bulat Okudzhava, Ia nikomu ne naviazyval . . ., ed. Aleksandr Petrakov (Moscow: Knizhnyimagazin“Moskva,”1997), pp. 41-42.

188. Quoted in Smith, Songs to Seven Strings, p. 117.189. Quoted in Ibid., p. 153.190. For further discussion of Vysotsky’s career, see Christopher Lazarski,“Vladimir Vysotsky

and His Cult,”in The Russian Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (January 1992). Regarding Vysotsky’sviews concerning his guitar poetry, see Vladimir Vysotskii, Chetyre chetverti puti, ed. A. E.Krylov (Moscow: Fizkul’tura i sport, 1988), pp. 119, 135.

191. Quoted in Smith, Songs to Seven Strings, p. 199. 192. Regarding Galich’s views concerning repression in the cultural sphere, see U mikrofona

Aleksandr Galich . . . Izbrannye teksty i zapisi, eds. Julian Panich, Ariadne Nicolaeff, andSergei Iourienen (Munich: Radio Liberty, 1990), pp. 113-115.

193. Quoted in Ibid., pp. 203-204.194. John Dornberg, Brezhnev: The Masks of Power (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 202.195. Quoted in Schwarz, Music and Musical Life, p. 445.196. Leo Feigin (ed.), Russian Jazz -- New Identity (London: Quartet Books, 1985).197. Troitsky, Back in the USSR, pp. 25, 30. Regarding Soviet officialdom’s reaction to the

issuance of the Beatles’White Album, see Deanna Campbell Robinson, Elizabeth B. Buck,and Marlene Cuthbert, Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Cultural Diversity(Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991), p. 71.

198. Sabrina P. Ramet, Sergei Zamascikov, and Robert Bird,“The Soviet Rock Scene,”inSabrina Petra Ramet (ed.), Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europeand Russia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 183.

199. Quoted in Ibid., p. 193.200. “The Nature of Official Documents Concerning Control of Vocal/Instrumental Groups and

Discotheques,”trans. from Arkhiv Samizdata (Radio Liberty Research), 18 October 1985, byAntonia Lloyd-Jones, in Survey, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer 1985), pp. 176-177.

201. Hilary Pilkington, Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A Nation’s Constrictors and Constructed(London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 80.

202. Le Poivedin,“Relationism and Temporal Topology,”p. 155. For a discussion of thedistinction between“continuous time”and“discrete time,”see“Time”in The CambridgeDictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 804-805.Regarding absolute relational theories, and notions of temporal asymmetry, see “Time,” inThe Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan/Free Press, 1967), Vol. 8, pp. 129-131.

203. Prior,“Recent Advances in Tense Logic,”p. 5.204. Ibid., p. 5, emphasis added.205. David Lewis,“The Paradoxes of Time Travel,”in Le Poivedin and MacBeath (eds.), The

Philosophy of Time, p. 142.206. Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1992), pp. 124-126, 146.207. Related to me by Viktor Gaiduk, once a close confidante of Gorbachev’s, who had tried, in

vain, to persuade the then-party leader of Stavropol (in the early 1970s, on the occasion of avisit to Niccolo Machiavelli’s house in Italy), to read Machiavelli’s The Prince andDiscourses. -- Conversation with V. Gaiduk, Bergen, Norway, 28 May 1997.

208. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. from German by William McNeill (Oxford:Blackwell, 1992), p. 14E.

209. Quoted in Taylor, Art and Literature, pp. 45-46.


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